Ewelina Knapska, PhD, Associate Prof., graduated from the University of Warsaw, majoring in biology in psychology. She was then conferred the PhD degree in Neurobiology by the Necki Institute at the Polish Academy of Sciences (2006). After her PhD studies, she completed a two-year-long scientific internship at the University of Michigan (USA). She is a scholarship holder of the Foundation for Polish Science, the Minister of Science and Higher Education, and Academia Europea. In 2016 she received a prestigious European Research Council grant. Her works have given rise to research into socially transferred emotions on animal models.

 

THE SCOPE OF THE RESEARCH

The subject-matter of our research is to explore how the brain conditions emotions, and in particular the neurobiological mechanisms of socially evoked emotions. By employing our models of social transfer of emotions in rats and mice, we attempt to understand the mechanisms occurring in the brain which manage social communication mechanisms, as well as to identify the neural circuits controlling socially transferred emotions, and to relate them to the outcomes obtained in humans. Exploring these mechanisms appears indispensable for explaining the conditioning, and for attempts to treat social behaviour disorders such as autism.